The False-Bottom Wagon

The wagon was built by a man in Missouri who asked no questions, which was the first qualification, and who understood joinery, which was the second.

The false bottom was eighteen inches of solid dark: room enough for two of us lying flat, with enough air for a night’s travel if we were careful about breathing, which we were not required to be. The couple above us, blood-bound both, were sufficiently convincing that nobody looked too closely; the wife resembled me enough that if we were ever both seen in daylight it would mean I had already made a mistake that put resemblance beyond the point of mattering.

Westward expansion, they call it now, as though the land had been empty and waiting. I know something about moving into vacancies. I know what it requires.

We robbed the stagecoaches first. The trains later, when the trains came. We were efficient: money and not lives, when that was an option, which it was not always. The bounties on outlaws who preyed on the wagon trains were substantial enough that we eventually found it more profitable to offer protection and then invite the outlaws in, which was a strategy I had already perfected in Louisiana, updated for the setting.

Sings did not love this work. I should say that plainly. She was with me and she was useful and she was, as always, the better part of my operational judgment; but she had not survived three wars and the dissolution of her nation in order to ride across the country running a protection scheme. She was watching the land change around her with the particular attention of someone who knows what that kind of change means and has seen it before.

I watched her watching it.

I did not know then that I had only until 1861. If I had known I might have stopped us on the prairie somewhere and looked at her looking at the grass, and held that moment longer than I did.

Probably not. I am not a woman who learns those lessons easily.

I am learning one now. Three hundred years in. Still slow.

The false-bottom wagon is gone; it rotted somewhere in Kansas Territory in the 1850s, long after we had moved on to other arrangements. But I remember the dark of it, the eighteen inches of solid black and the sound of hooves above and the creak of the wheel and Sings breathing beside me, which she did not need to do either, which I have always thought of as a kind of company she was keeping for my benefit.

The dark below and the world above and us in between.

It was not the Sanguine Judge. But it was not nothing.